10/25 Marvel Ultimate Alliance - Xbox, 360, PS2, and many more

[Morfiend]

So I pucked this up. I love this game. Its seriously great. If you like Xmen Legends and Legends 2, this game is a total MUST buy. I like it about 10x more than the xmen ones. Its really fun. This weekend I probably spend over 25 hours playing it. And I cant wait to get home from work and play more.

One note of caution. If you have the Xbox360 version, DO NOT put in any of the character pre order codes, or any cheat codes. You will not be able to get any Achevements, and the only way to turn off cheats is to delete ALL your saved games, and also ether delete your Xbox Live profile, or play under a different one, but then you wont get achevements on your main profile anyway.

[Hokers]

Picked this up but have not played it.  Thanks for the warning about the codes, mine included one for the Silver Surfer unlock.  Guess I'll have to earn it.

[Sky]

Ah shit. I forgot this was coming out. This will sorely test my 'don't buy any more games this year' budget. Legends were both great beat-em-uppers.

I'll be on the pc version, paying $20 extra just seems insane to me.

[Morfiend]

Ah shit. I forgot this was coming out. This will sorely test my 'don't buy any more games this year' budget. Legends were both great beat-em-uppers.

I'll be on the pc version, paying $20 extra just seems insane to me.

I seem to recall you dont have a 360. If you do BUY this for 360. Its amazing. I guess actually for you it doesnt matter, cause you play your PC on your TV.

This game is pure luv. No other way to put it.

[stray]

The X-Men games were fun, but AoE was super overpowered (I could stand in the middle of the screen with Phoenix or Professor X and just kill hundreds of enemies with ease). Is there anything like that here?

[murdoc]

I've been debating this game since it came out. So far reviews have been pretty good for it. Dumb question, is there save points or can you save your progress where ever you want?

[NinjaSteve]

There's save points just like the previous X-men Legends games.  Played this on my friends X-box and had a blast.  I'm now debating with myself on whether i should get it on my X-box 360 (Much, much better graphics I hope?) or just on my PC.

[Morfiend]

The X-Men games were fun, but AoE was super overpowered (I could stand in the middle of the screen with Phoenix or Professor X and just kill hundreds of enemies with ease). Is there anything like that here?

Most characters have access to AE abilities, but they dont have enough "omph" to clear mobs with. Usually I use AE to soften up large groups of mobs. The single target abilities are about 3 to 4 times more damaging, I can some times one hit weeker targets with a fully charged single target attack ability. But in no way is it like Jean Grays AE in Legends where she just made the game ridiculously easy.

I've been debating this game since it came out. So far reviews have been pretty good for it. Dumb question, is there save points or can you save your progress where ever you want?

There are S.H.I.E.L.D access points scattered throughout the levels. At these points, you can Save, or switch up team members, or change team members outfits. You usually come across one every 15 minutes or so. But the game also does invisible saves all the time, and if you die, it will load you from your last checkpoint. Also you get a Portal, that is like the Town Portal of Diablo (and friends). The portal doesnt need any thing you buy, but it has like a 5 minute cooldown. Also, you cant use the portal in certen area, like boss fights.
All in all you have plenty of chances to save.

[Morfiend]

There's save points just like the previous X-men Legends games.  Played this on my friends X-box and had a blast.  I'm now debating with myself on whether i should get it on my X-box 360 (Much, much better graphics I hope?) or just on my PC.

The cinematics and gameplay graphics are really really good. The cut sceens that use the ingame engine are not so good. But while playing I am constantly thinking to myself "wow, that looks just like I thought it would".

Oh yeah, the flying is done really well also.

If anyone has this for 360 and wants to try a few levels, let me know.

Also, my current team is Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Deadpool, and Ghost Rider. I mostly play Iron Man, and my friend plays Silver Surfer, and the others are just kind of extras. Deadpool has a very nice AE sword spin attack thats great for clearing lots of very week monsters, and Ghost Rider has a great single target nuke that is not LOS, and its very easy to combo it with my friend playing Silver Surfer. Right now I am haflway through Act3, out of 5.

[Damn Dirty Ape]

A couple of questions, por favor:

1) How many characters do you have to control at once?  Do you play as one character with the ability to switch out for another, or is it like Freedom Force in which you have to herd your team around at the same time?

2) Is Thor in his classic silver age costume or is he portrayed as a biker diety?

[Morfiend]

A couple of questions, por favor:

1) How many characters do you have to control at once?  Do you play as one character with the ability to switch out for another, or is it like Freedom Force in which you have to herd your team around at the same time?

2) Is Thor in his classic silver age costume or is he portrayed as a biker diety?

1) You can have 4 "active" characters. You can switch any of them out any time you find a S.H.I.E.L.D. point (very often). Also at the start of level 3, you can create your own "Team" ala the X-Men or Avengers. You get a team logo, and a name. Also, once you have your team, it also earns EXP, and can level up, and you get bonuses to health, energy (mana), XP earned, or Bench. Now, ill come back to bench in a second. To access these team bonuses and to earn your team xp, you have to have all 4 of your team members as your active players. This kind of sucks, cause you get penalized for switching characters. You start with 4 members, but each point you add to Team Bench, you can add another member to your team. Right now I have the above listed 4 characters as well as Wolveren and Dr. Strange.
When playing, you have one character under your control and the other 3 are computer controlled. You can change which character you control at any time.

2) Thor starts in his newer Suit. All characters in MUA has 4 different suits you can unlock. And its not just graphical. Each suit has different possible bonuses. Lets take Thor, his starting suit might have + to hammer damage, + to defence, and + to Max heath. Then his classic suit might have +to lightning, and +to Max Energy, and +to (random thing here).

On Ghost Riders classic suit, he has a 10% chance to automatically bring back to life any killed team member.

[stray]

Is there a Danger Room type thing where you can power level (heh) characters you don't use as much?

[Damn Dirty Ape]

Thanks, Morphiend.  I may just have to pick this game up to get my Thor on.  Hopefully, the costume unlock process isn't too tedious.

[NinjaSteve]

There's save points just like the previous X-men Legends games.  Played this on my friends X-box and had a blast.  I'm now debating with myself on whether i should get it on my X-box 360 (Much, much better graphics I hope?) or just on my PC.

The cinematics and gameplay graphics are really really good. The cut sceens that use the ingame engine are not so good. But while playing I am constantly thinking to myself "wow, that looks just like I thought it would".

Oh yeah, the flying is done really well also.

If anyone has this for 360 and wants to try a few levels, let me know.

Also, my current team is Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Deadpool, and Ghost Rider. I mostly play Iron Man, and my friend plays Silver Surfer, and the others are just kind of extras. Deadpool has a very nice AE sword spin attack thats great for clearing lots of very week monsters, and Ghost Rider has a great single target nuke that is not LOS, and its very easy to combo it with my friend playing Silver Surfer. Right now I am haflway through Act3, out of 5.

I figured the graphics were waay nicer on the 360.  The flying is pretty well done.  I remember my buddy playing Ironman flying around and shooting enemies below him.  I think our team we used was Wolverine, Spider-woman, Iron-man and Human Torch.  All in all there are tons of combinations and tons of characters to use which makes for a lot of fun especially for any Marvel Comics fan.
Deadpool is fast becoming one of my favorite characters too.  It's funny because I never heard of him before but he's like a combination of Wolverine fighting abilities and Spider-man's wisecracks.   

[Sairon]

I found this to be decently enjoyable. Balance seems fairly whack, wolverine do way to much dmg. Bosses goes down in the range of 5 - 10 seconds. Normal mobs dies in 1 - 3 attacks depending on type. He also has a shitload of hp and defense so he's pretty much immortal. What killed the game in the long run was that you unlocked all the moves fairly fast and after that it's just just mashing 1 button pretty much all the time. There's very little equipment tinkering as well, 1 slot and 4 suits as mentioned to choose among. These are also unlocked fairly fast. I probably won't finish the game being at the end of act 2 of I believe 5. On the positive side characters do play fairly diffrent and if you're into marvel superheros ( I'm not ), then that's added value of course.

[stray]

and if you're into marvel superheros ( I'm not ), then that's added value of course.

Not to say that gameplay isn't important, but as far these games go, being into Marvel superheroes is more than half of the point.

[Trippy]

Is there a Danger Room type thing where you can power level (heh) characters you don't use as much?

There's a S.H.I.E.L.D. Simulator which I'm guessing acts similarly to the Danger Room in the X-Men Legends games. It doesn't sound like it has the training course-style design that the DR had though.

[Strazos]

I'm sure a friend and I are in the minority here when I say that we found Legends 2 to be painfully dull and boring. We got to some point in the second act (jungle or whatever) and just had to put the game down. It just felt...meh. Oddly enough, we romped through both Dark Alliance games, and the D&D Heroes games.

Oh, on topic...um...the box art is nice? Carry on.

[Wolf]

The game is just awesome. I love it. But like Sairon said, Wolverine is so imbalanced it's not even fun playing him. He has some sort of combo points that fill up, once he has all of them he enters into "Rage" mode where he attacks faster and faster. When you add his self buff that gives attack speed and spiderman's party buff that gives even more attack speed it gets ridiculous. I just removed him from my team, so I can keep the game interesting :)

Also AoE attacks are kind of strong, especially on Storm :)

[Morfiend]

I have Wolverine in my group, but I mostly let the computer play him. He does feel like the designers gave him special treatment, but honestly, I can kill stuff way faster with Iron Man or Ghost Rider.

Now, my only gripe about the game. I wish there was more hot buttons for special moves. I know you can fairly easilly switch between hot buttoned abilities, but 3 just seems so limited. I wish we had 6.

[Sky]

Wolverine was pretty badass in Legends because of his regen, he didn't really use up health potions. He was a good exploring the map-type character, swap to a big nuker for combat. I actually enjoyed playing Magma once I got used to her powers, but I usually tried to go with an old-school x-men team with cyke, iceman, jean and beast.

As if I weren't already all over this game, the thing about forming supergroups Morph was talking about is just shweet.

[Morfiend]

As if I weren't already all over this game, the thing about forming supergroups Morph was talking about is just shweet.

Its really cool. The only problem is, there are so many heroes to choose from, good luck picking 4 to start with.

A few things of note also.
-Unlike Legends, there are no heal potions, which I like. A few characters get healing abilities, but mostly you get health and mana from killing people of breaking barrels, which speeds up the game.
-Deadpool says some funny shit. When he levels he says "Now Im better at doing what Wolverine does". Or if you try and use a special ability but dont have enough energy he says "Im low on mana, but Vitimine C fortified". And tons of other wacky shit.
-Characters dont regen mana while flying, keep it in mind.
-Take all your characters (even the ones your not using) off of Auto Spend Points at level. Otherwise the computer will spread your points very thin, and having only 3 hotkeys, to start you get much more bang buy only pumping 1 or two abilities.
-ALL characters in the game scale to your level, so if you do swap out characters, you dont have to spend a ton of time leveling them up to your level.
-You cant start your own group until the 3rd mission, I didnt know this and spent forever looking for the option to create my group.

[stray]

Silver Surfer should be able to solo this game.

[Sky]

I finally beat Gothic 2 (great game!) and dug into my next 'finish before I build a pc game', X-Men Legends 2. I guess I'll drop comments in here, since this is sort of a sequel?

Amazing game, I'm just about to finish one of the two missions after the Savage Lands, the Core from the Weapon X Facility quests. So many little details are popping out that I never noticed (or weren't) in the original Legends.

You can form supergroups with bonuses, but only for certain combinations. I had been playing with Magneto, Juggernaut, Pyro and Toad as the Brotherhood...but for some reason they don't register as the Brotherhood. Swap out Pyro for Scarlet Witch and bam, Brotherhood of Evil with 5% exp bonus. I don't have enough original x-men to build the old-school team, but if you use just characters from that era (cyke, jean grey, iceman and magneto, frinstance) you get the Old School bonus, I've also found the New X-Men group.

Another great thing: ability to buy respecs. As you level up and tend to use different powers...bam, respec! Also, finally figured out how to change the power hotkey assignments from the main screen instead of being stuck with the four from the configuration screen.

Playing with Juggernaut as my main, his voice is wicked familiar but I just can't place it. Hulk Hogan? He rocks, but I also like Toad, partly because I got a green piece of gear (white - normal, blue - good, yellow - rare, green - special) for him that gives him insane buffs like +500 defense (at level 22). His buff rocks, especially with Juggy's lumbering walk. Adding Wanda was great, turning enemies into goodie boxes still makes me chuckle.

Can't wait to check out the new game, hopefully by springtime.

[HaemishM]

Juggernaut is listed as John Di Maggio, the voice of Bender from Futurama. He was the General in the first X-Men Legends game.

[Sky]

Ah, yeah IMDB. Smilin' Jack from Vampire Bloodlines :)

[stray]

Finally got around to playing this. Not a bad port (PS3), especially for a game that's on almost every system (including the PSP). Not only does it not look like shit, but they even included tilt controls.

I don't like my starting team though. Hopefully it doesn't take too long to get Namor, Strange, Daredevil, and the Surfer.

[EDIT] Not nearly as good of an ARPG as Rogue Galaxy btw. ;) If only because of the boss fights.

Or rather, what I mean is I used to really like this type of button mashing RPG just a year ago. But Rogue Galaxy raised the bar, I think.

[Sky]

The Game Lords giveth, the Game Lords taketh away.

I've just barely dipped in, but they start me with two guys I wanted to play, Iron Man and Thor.

On the plus side, graphics are a real nice upgrade. They based PC gamepad support around my gamepad, the logitech cordless rumblepad 2, so the numbers on the screen map to the numbers on my gamepad (used to drive me nuts in XMen Legends trying to figure out which button was which until I memorized the keyboard > gamepad conversion). Costumes can be buffed with different effects, seems like a cool idea.

On the minus, it's way streamlined. I'm pretty disappointed the character customization took a big hit. There are about half as many powers and development of them seems linear, so no choices of whether you have a spit-based Toad or a tongue-based Toad. Toad is Toad (well, if he were in here). I mentioned Toad because I miss his movement speed buff already :) You can't set up stats anymore, but that might be ok since aside from melee characters you just pumped power anyway. Wearables is down from three per character to one per character.

I also wish you could set AI controls per character in the XML1/2 style. Not sure whether the removal of healt/power potion was a good or bad thing. I miss bashing walls and doors down, maybe removed because the game seems heavy on might characters.

Rocky cameo start...Bullseye I don't care for, and Radioactive Man and Winter Soldier are scraping the barrel. But then a Fin Fang Foom boss battle? Alright, that makes up some ground.

First group is an Avengers group - Iron Man, Thor, Ms. Marvel (area heal, nukes) and Cappy (nice shield attack).

[stray]

The Cap is a lot cooler than I expected him to be. Shield attacks are the shit. Might keep him around full time.


On the other hand, those hero specific missions freaking SUCK. Or maybe I should just say the Captain's mission sucks (the one where he has to disarm bombs and fight the Winter Soldier). I haven't tried anything else yet.

And why does it suck?

Tilt controls. The very thing I was impressed by at first is the thing that makes this game a bitch.

Btw, by "tilt", I mean the PS3's Sixaxis controls. It's a cool idea for some things (say, if you grab an enemy, you can throw him directionally with the controller. Or if you need to push an object over a ledge, the tilt controls come into play).

But damn, that Cap mission has these scenarios where you have to disarm bombs. It requires a lot of directional movements in sequence. If you fuck up once, you're dead. :\

[stray]

This game disappoints me. For one thing: The weapons I take from minion mobs are more damaging than any of my hero's powers. A hammer I take off some bullshit mob hits harder than Mjolnir. That's some major bullshit.

The Surfer is way too much work to unlock (have to beat all comic missions). They should have just made him unlockable like Dr. Strange (through a quest). Better yet, just give me a Silver Surfer game. ;)

Nick Fury is pretty much pointless to unlock (have to beat the game).

[Sky]

That was the lame way they set up Iron Man in XML2, you have to collect all the pieces of armor and then rescue him. By the time you rescue him, it's within a mission or two of the end of the game.

Maybe we're supposed to love the game so much we play through it a bunch of times?

I haven't gotten back to playing it yet.

[stray]

If this were a fighting game, I'd replay to unlock characters. But I don't do that with a beat em ups and rpg's. I want those features to be there in the story -- the first time through.

[Azazel]

I'll second that. Unlocking Iron Man or the SS at the end of the game doesn't "increase playability". It just pisses me off because I'm not fucking playing through all that again.

[Morfiend]

Well, think of it like Diablo, once your finished, you can play through again with your existing characters on Hard mode.

[stray]

Diablo had cooler loot ;)

These Raven games are more fun to me in general though. For one run at least.